Turns out the Camera story re: Lafayette's curfews we've been debating was incorrect in their large "Council Rolls Back Curfew" headline today. A correction online has been added to show what Councilor Bensman said below - they only asked the City Attorney to come back with language changing it for consideration. As a writer I feel bad for reporter Kate Larson who misunderstood the Council discussion. Always tough when you announce the wrong news.
Curfews. What a lazy, paranoid rule for a place with an otherwise good ol' small town feel. So you can't walk the streets because the police say so. Does that keep the unsupervised kids from doing dangerous things indoors? Where are the stats showing curfews prevent anything (in towns of similar size and demographics) to a significant degree? What is the history of the curfew? What "we must do something" scenario brought the curfew into play? Want to give police something to do? Make it illegal to simply be outside at a certain time.
Show me the stats to justify it, I'll happily eat crow. Perhaps I'm the paranoid one.
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I've asked the Rec Center director to post the rationale for the Youth Advisory Board's request on the city web site.
I suggest you query the Police Chief and high school principals about the risk of and to minors being out during the late hours of the night, especially driving. Read the crime reports posted weekly by the PD.
Or better yet, tune into Channel 8 to hear the Chief's testimony.
Dan, read your own Yellow Scene about the gang problem in East Boulder County.
Who do you think is out there after 10 p.m. these days? Those with legitimate reasons have no cause for concern.
Take a civilian ride along with our PD at night. Cruising 287 is quite an experience.
Curfew is not going to prevent every possible circumstance from happening, but teenagers are not fully mature in their ability to think and reason.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/ teenbrain/work/adolescent.html
Remove the space before teenbrain to use this link.
Curfew is a tool that allows police officers to return teens who may be just out having fun roaming the streets late at night to their homes.
Most people who are tasked with caring for children are asleep and therefore not able to supervise teens overnight. I'm talking about parents, teachers, library, rec center personnel and the like. Police officers are on duty around the clock acting as the eyes and ears of our community.
If I had a teenage daughter who had crept out of the house while I was asleep I would appreciate having her picked up and brought home by a police officer. Having a curfew law on the books allows them the ability to do just that.
Guess I’ll post this here instead of the “Brats in Battalions” thead.
I can be convinced to change my mind, but only with stats, not repetitive, anecdotal, scary stories.
But here’s a start on the stats.
Dan Macallair, associate director of the nonprofit Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, notes that juvenile crime has been declining in general since 1992. To determine whether curfews were a factor in the drop, the center's Justice Policy Institute examined data from the state of California from 1978 through 1996--the first comprehensive study of the issue.
Their answer was unequivocal."This study found that youth curfews do not reduce youth crime," Macallair and study co-author Mike Males wrote. "This was true for any race of youth, for any region, for any type of crime. In those few instances in which a significant effect on youth crime was found, curfews were more likely to be associated with an increase in youth crime (not including curfew citations)."
Macallair and Males compared changes in crime rates with changes in curfew-enforcement rates. (Some curfews are barely enforced, so it's not enough to note whether a town simply has a curfew.) To capture local variations, they also compared curfew arrest rates and youth crime rates for the 12 most populous counties in the state and for cities with populations over 100,000 in Los Angeles and Orange counties. They examined the ratio of youth crime rates to adult crime rates for each year, compared with curfew enforcement rates. They found "no support for the proposition that stricter curfew enforcement reduces youth crime either absolutely or relative to adults, by location, or by type of crime."
Unless the Lafayette PD has been strongly enforcing the curfew, any stats the PD provides to prove otherwise will not be relevant. In other words, if they haven't been strongly enforcing the curfew, and crime is down, there are other reasons for the drop in crime. Just because A occurred, and B occurred, doesn't mean A caused B.
Also, the ACLU has stated repeatedly the proper response to juvenile crime is to arrest the criminals, not to place all law-abiding young people under house arrest. The ACLU has also brought suits against jurisdictions over curfews and won.
An analogy? We have a problem with drinking and driving, but we didn’t ban everyone from the streets after a certain hour. We deal with the problem drivers only.
Now, let’s see some stats that prove curfews work.
Unfortunate that this debate has taken on the character of do curfews work or should they be banned entirely? That's an argument of the extremes.
Of course curfews are a useful tool. Dan and Doktorbombay and a few thousand teenagers may be the only people in the community who want to get rid of them. I appreciate the argument that curfews are nothing more than a form of martial law, but the reality is probably far closer to what the Chief and various others here describe. In other words, police use curfew to justify intervention before a crime is committed. Waiting for teens to commit crime or put themselves in a position to be preyed upon is not good policy.
However, I think the other side of this is missing one key point that Doktorbombay made. Which is that you don't want a law to be so unreasonable that people learn to disrespect and ignore it. We're talking about a one-hour change, not allowing teens to be out "all hours of the day." The change proposed by the YAC, and the rationale presented by Curt Cheesman, are an attempt to make Lafayette's law uniform with our neighbors. The data that everyone wants should therefore be out there: Is there a crime problem with youth between the hours of 10 and 11 in these neighboring communities relative to Lafayette? If crime stats don't show something going on in those communities that we should be concerned about, I'm not sure arguing about theory and curfews in general is very enlightening.
Because the proposed ordinance will be scheduled and a public hearing held, there will be an opportunity to get facts on the table.
If you get a chance to carefully listen to the police chief's testamony, he wasn't overly enthusiastic about changing the curfew hours. The YAB request was also to lower the maximum age to 16. So any minor over 16 would be exempt. He refused to recommend that. (Colorado has changed its drivers license requirements to try to insure 16 year olds have more driving experience than they used to have. That was driven by the accident rate.)
Another interesting statistic is a simple fact. Automobile insurance for those between 16 and 25 are extremely high. The accident and mortality rate for teenage drivers is quite high. Auto accidents are the number one killer of teenagers.
Now the YAB request was primarily based on the need for minors to drive to Louisville and Boulder for events that required returning home after 10 p.m. That is not a violation of the current ordination. That was explained to them.
So who believes that was the real motive for the request? In Lafayette except for 287, any one driving around on weekdays after 10 p.m. sticks out like a sore thumb.
Go ahead, Kerry, tell us the "real motive."
Asking you.
Their stated reasons of concern were not in violation of the current ordinance. That was explained to them.
Hidden motives? I don't think so. The point is there are plenty of legitimate reasons for youth to be out until 11:00 p.m., period.
I'll grant that the current ordinance is broadly formulated in its exemptions, and that I have no reason to believe the police are overstepping the intent of the policy. But it's still reasonable to ask for a change to 11:00 if we don't think the cloud of suspicion should hang over every kid who is out that late. Being pulled over by the rolling lights can be a traumatic experience, no matter whether a violation results or not. Do we want respect for the law or fear of the law?
I'm for keeping the ordinance the way it is if there is some data from surrounding communities that shows a problem as a result of their slightly more lenient ordinances; otherwise it would seem to me that parents ought to set appropriate curfews for their kids, as needed, in advance of the one enforced by the police.
By the way, the relevant ordinance is Lafayette Municipal Code 75-116. The earlier link brings up the entire City code.
Since the curfew ordinance exempts minors who are out after 10 p.m. on Sunday throught Thursday for a wide number of reasons, Alex, could you share the valid reasons minors should be out after 10 p.m. that are not exempted by the ordinance? If there are some, the ordinance could be modified for those reasons as well.
A consideration that this blog continues to ignor is the Police Chief's concern of non-resident minors present after 10 p.m. As an article in The Yellow Scene describes, gang activity is a growing focus in East Boulder County.
To suggest being pulled over by the police after 10 p.m. as a "traumatic experience" is quite a stretch. One has to wonder what type of trauma occurs. Perhaps someone here can cite a couple of medical journals that have published articles on the matter.
Another question is if the current curfew is so unfair and minors are being traumatized, why haven't the parents, school administrators, etc. complained to the city council? Haven't heard of any such complaint?
Also, every patrol car is equipped with a police version of a wireless laptop. Cops check out license plates of cars while on patrol. They can tell if the plates have a local address and who the owner is.
Whatever. If there's no other way to disrupt gang activity than curfew laws between the hours of 10:00 and 11:00 p.m., we really are in trouble... This is all ridiculously overblown, if you want my honest opinion. I favor uniformity with surrounding communities. Beyond that, I'll let the proponents speak to the council themselves.
Well said, Alex.
Out.
The curfew does little to stop "gangs", or in lafayette, any group of 2 or more people under the age of 21 that look suspicious. I have to deal with young people out way after 10:00 in my neighborhood, even doing annoying things like setting off fireworks near my bedroom when I try to sleep or shouting and cursing at the park down the street. I think if I called the cops they would do something, whether there was a curfew or not, but usually an angry shout does the trick and they move on, probably to annoy someone else. The curfew does nothing to stop those who want to be out, from being out. They just go to places where law enforcement is minimal or easy to escape from.
I don't want to share the fear of everything that you seem to embrace Kerry. What is so threatening about kids to you? Laws that protect people from themselves can be foolish.
A couple of final comments for me and I'll let it go.
The police chief's comments were taped and will be replayed on Channel 8. He will also be queried again when the proposed modified ordinance is considered. So any one can assess his opinion as a professional or discard it in favor of a lay person's opinion.
As for my dilemma on this, I have to vote on it. Weigh the request of a group of minors, the expertise of our PD, input from a number of parents I respect, and my own personal observations and experience (two sons, adult age. So that's the responsibility I have. At the extreme, this could me a matter of life or death of a minor or the victim of a minor's action that time of night. The newspapers are full of these type of accounts.
I was asked once to be on a parent panel at Northwestern University to give advice to the senior class. The CEOs on the panel gave the usual work hard, dream big, stick to it, blah, blah, blah. My approach was "keep healthy and stay alive. Can't accomplish anything else if you don't." The CEOs went out of their way to thank me.
It is a lot simple to just be Alfred E. Neuman on this. "What, me worry?" After all, this isn't about my kids.
Maybe we should add two advisory boards, One for responsible parents with teenagers and another for irresponsible parents with teenagers. Be interesting.
I asked Dan to post this topic on this blog to see what the response would be. So thanks for the dialogue.
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